U.S. and Israel: Barbarians of the Middle East
August 10, 2024—Israel is an imperialist-backed settler-colonial state, and it is a cancerous intruder in the Middle East which has never been welcomed there. It would not even exist as a state had its Zionist creators not had the full backing of first British and now U.S. imperialism. The Zionist organization was an ally of the British as it sought Palestine for colonization in the early 1900s. After World War II, and as the Britain was turning its colonialist “mandate” over to the U.S., Zionists declared themselves a state, with full support from the U.S.
Thus was the monster that was falsely legitimated into statehood, empowered to make war against its neighbors for the next seven decades, and now deliberately causing genocide in the Gaza Strip. Despite international condemnations from just about everybody, the head of this racist/fascist government Benjamin Netanyahu, gets a standing ovation in the U.S. Congress. Days later, this war-crazy freak has asserted that Israel is at war with the whole of the Middle East.
This latter comes as no surprise, as Israel has been terrorizing and attacking most of its Arab neighbors since well before its nationhood was illegally founded in 1947. And Netanyahu needs more war to keep himself in office instead of in jail or just out of office due to his unpopularity.
A criminal state
Netanyahu’s statement came just after one of Israel’s most visible crimes, which shocked and angered countries well beyond the Middle East—it’s assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, the political head of Hamas, who was in Tehran visiting for Iran’s presidential inauguration July 31st. He was literally blown apart by a bomb that Israeli agents had managed to plant in his room at Iran’s government guesthouse, and remotely detonate it.
It was obvious that Israel was behind the bombing, but to this day, Netanyahu’s government has refused to say anything about it. This assassination had been planned after the Hamas attack of October 7th, but apparently Netanyahu hadn’t even told Israel’s banker/weapons supplier about the assassination plan before the execution. The U.S. meekly admitted that Israel was behind it, but did so “privately,” according to the New York Times.
The U.S. had little interest in the victim, but to the world Haniyeh was a highly respected world leader whose murder is rightly treated as an act of war, which has to be strongly condemned. Born in Gaza, he was a leader in the First Intifada as part of the Palestinian Resistance, Hamas, and was a leader of the “Change and Reform List” that was elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council in 2006. In later years he served on the Hamas political Bureau. Like so many Palestinians, he had lost several family members in the Israeli genocide after October 7 and was living in Qatar when he was assassinated.
Haniyeh’s murder by Israel, in what Hamas called a “Zionist raid,” was denounced around the world. The President of Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, called it an “unforgivable violence and killing.” Prayers were offered in mosques all over the country, and events were attended by officials, diplomats and the public. The vice president of Indonesia described Haniyeh as “a fighter for the liberation and independence of Palestine from Israeli occupation.”
A world outraged
The Malaysia Prime Minister attended a prayer event in the National Mosque in Kuala Lumpur and ordered such events to be held around the country. A national march was planned for the upcoming Sunday, and the Prime Minister called the killing a “most despicable” crime. Millions in Pakistan participated in prayers in the mosques, and the Parliament passed a resolution denouncing the killing—and tens-of-thousands also came out to denounce this crime in Turkey, Lebanon, Yemen, and Jordan.
On the same day as the Haniyeh murder, Israel targeted and killed a senior leader of Hezbollah, the formidable ally of Iran based in Lebanon with which Israel has been at war almost as long as it has existed. Fouad Shukr was one of the founders of the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon, and a top functionary in various tasks, including external affairs, commanding a military unit, and overseeing missile and naval forces. Shukr was killed in an airstrike that also killed and wounded several civilians.
The Haniyeh and Shukr killings were part of a pattern. Assassinations of key leaders and opponents is built into Israel’s modus operandi—and collateral damage is of no interest to it. Israel has killed at least 23 specifically targeted people between November 24, 1993 and the Haniyeh and Shukr killings on July 31, including the founder of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, in March 2004; the founder and first commander of Hamas’ military wing, Salah Shehadeh in 2004; Hamas’ interior minister, Saeed Siam in 2009—and many more. The murders were carried out by Mossad agents, air strikes from helicopters, armored vehicles, or even missiles. One of the few killings that did not include bystanders was done by an explosive device hidden in a mobile phone.
The killings took place mostly in Gaza City, and in various locations; and most of them also took out family members, bystanders, aides, etc. The murder of Salah Shehadeh took place in an airstrike by an F-16 jet that destroyed an entire residential block, killing 13 people including his wife and daughter (and who knows how many buried under the rubble.)
Decades of wars
For Palestinians, Israel may as well be Murder, Inc.1 on steroids. In seven decades of war against Palestine and its Arab neighbors—before the current genocide—Israel killed some 57,540 of Palestine’s mostly unarmed people. The first three aggressions—the Arab/Israeli war of 1948-49, the Six-Day War in 1967, in which Israel won control over Gaza and the West Bank, and the Yom Kippur War in 1973—accounted for the vast majority of these killings, at about 47,300. Then, in two intifadas Palestinians fought back, but were unable to stop Israel’s aggression, and lost more fighters in the attempt.
These repetitive wars were bad enough, but Israel always had some excuse for them that covered up its true intent, which was to claim its “God-given right” to occupy lands they have always seen as their own. Now, to finally make this happen after the seven decades of working on it, Israel has launched its own version of the Nazi Holocaust that mass-murdered so many of their ancestors. With generous supplies of weapons and funding from its imperialist over-lord and handler in the U.S., Israel is throwing its well-equipped army and air force at a population with neither, and which is imprisoned, being starved to death, and denied almost all medical aid.
The health ministry in Gaza gives the killed and wounded numbers daily, based on reports from hospitals and other sources. At this writing, it is pushing past 40,000 dead, in just eight months. Gaza puts the wounded at 91,469, with an estimate of the dead (and possibly wounded hoping for rescue) who have been buried under the rubble standing at 11,000. The medical journal Lancet estimates the dead alone to be about 186,000, based on the effects of all the weapons Israel is using are taken into account—in addition to the bombing, starvation, disease, and infanticide.
The genocide of the century
Although Israel claims its war is against Hamas—the democratically elected governing party centered in Gaza and wrongly called “terrorists”—but its actual aim is to get rid of Palestinians by any means necessary, so that Israel can occupy this land under its century-old slogan: “a land without people for a people without a land.” And it has the gall to blame Hamas for its mass murder of civilians and destruction of homes and infrastructure since Hamas operates in tunnels under civilian grounds, and occupies civilian homes in civilian clothing, etc. Innocent humans just don’t matter. It is necessary for Israel to bomb everything—houses, apartment buildings, schools and even hospitals—to kill just a few Hamas members!
Every day there are multiple reports of new atrocities, such as this, from August 10, Haaretz reported that “Over 90 (later reports have it over 100) people were killed in an Israeli strike on a school sheltering displaced people in Gaza City, according to rescue services in the Strip.” As usual, the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) claims it was aiming to strike a Hamas command center embedded in the school, and that the number of casualties is exaggerated. Hamas often denies that it was there, but even if it was there, this is a grievous war crime, confirming Israel’s real target is the people, not Hamas. Condemnations of this slaughter have poured in from Britain, Egypt, Jordan, Iran, the EU, and more.
Israel kills and lies
A similar report of Israeli crime came from the Palestine Chronicle on July 30, “Israeli occupation forces targeted several neighborhoods in Khan Yunis with artillery shelling and blew up residential buildings in Al-Qarara, north of Khan Yunis.” Khan Yunis is located in the middle of the Strip and is Gaza’s second largest city. The largest city in the Strip—Gaza City—was the first city to be attacked by Israel. After a second major attack, it has now been heavily demolished. At this writing, Israel is opening up a new attack on Khan Yunis, after one its “evacuation orders,” which really means “come here and get shot.”
All of Gaza’s hospitals have been purposely targeted and attacked in bombings, direct invasion by troops, or both. Al Shifa, Gaza City’s hospital and the biggest in the Strip, has faced total devastation, with most of its buildings extensively damaged or destroyed, its equipment unusable or burned and reduced to ashes. The World Health Organization (WHO) found it to be “completely non-functional.” Even small clinics have been put out of service.
All of them are ether closed outright or crippled so badly that wounded Gazans that finally manage to make it there are impossible to save, due to a critical lack of life-saving medicines and equipment. These hospitals have been forced to dig mass burial trenches. In many cases these patients are dying on the hospital’s floor and buried in a makeshift cemetery—some who have lost their whole families without their names even being known.
Open fire without constraints
Israel’s savagery knows no bounds. It is now revealed that Israel has a long-standing secret policy known as the “Hannibal Directive.” This chilling policy calls for the Israeli military to keep its soldiers from being taken prisoners by the enemy, even if that means wounding or killing them in the process. This policy was drafted by Yossi Peled, the head of IDF’s Northern Command in 1986, along with other officers, in response to an attempt by Hezbollah to abduct two soldiers into southern Lebanon, according to an article in Haaretz dated January 17, 2024. The policy was also confirmed in a report in Al Jazeera, by Yahuda Shaul, a former Israeli army soldier last year. “You will open fire without constraints, in order to prevent the abduction,” was his instruction, Shaul said, adding that the use of force is carried out “even at the risk of killing a captive soldier.”
This horrifying policy was never run by legal experts, nor has it ever been published, but a “very senior IDF source” confirmed to Haaretz that the Hannibal Directive “was employed on October 7th.” There was great confusion, and apparently no military leadership. The brigadier general on the scene, Avi Rosenfeld, shouted “the Philistines have invaded,” then ducked into his office and didn’t come out, according to the Haaretz report. But some directives were made by officers on scene: “Not a single vehicle can return to Gaza,” “Hannibal at Erez,” and “dispatch Zik [an Israeli drone].”
These directives came at about midday, when the Hamas attackers were beginning to get back to Gaza in cars carrying captives as hostages, and Erez is one of the available crossings into Gaza, so calling for “Hannibal at Erez” meant shoot at the cars going back to Gaza, when everyone knew that they most likely carried Israeli captives. Later that day, some cars going back were passing near Kibbutz Be’eri, Kfar Azza, and Kissufim, and they were also shot at. Over all these months, the IDF has refused to admit it was using the Hannibal Directive, except for one shooting in a house in the Kibbutz Be’eri which has had extensive coverage. Thirteen out of the 14 hostages being held in that house were shot dead in Israel’s attack. The IDF says it is “investigating.”
The question that must be answered here is why does Israel need this war at all? It has made up for Israelis killed on October 7 many times over. Why does Israel attack and kill Palestinians for seven, eight decades and more? It has its statehood, so why is it a permanent murder machine against whole populations in both Gaza and the West bank?
People to be gotten rid of
It all goes back the founding of Israel as a settler state—but that is putting it mildly. Israel was a state meant to drive out another people. These “people without a land” were to literally steal the land from its owners of hundreds of years and take it over. This goal is in Israel’s DNA—then and today.
The Zionist organization, created to take on this task, grew up allied with Britain in that nation’s imperialist drive to claim Palestine as a colony. This was part and parcel of the drive of European countries to occupy the lands of the Ottoman Empire which dominated what is now the Middle East, but which was weakening and losing out, principally to Britain and France. This was during the years around the first world war, 1914 through November 1918. Britain was aiming for Palestine, and the French were fighting for what is now Lebanon, parts of Syria and Anatolia (now Turkey), as was worked out in the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement2 in 1916.
The Zionists had been seeking an imperialist state to align with, because they could not achieve what they wanted alone. By working with Britain, they developed the backing of British leaders—Loyd George, Churchill and Balfour—who aligned with a “Jewish national home,” and promised the Zionist leader, Chaim Weizmann, that they would never allow a representative government in Palestine. Thus, the Zionists now had an indispensable “iron wall” of British military support. This was publicly declared in the Balfour Declaration of 19173, but only gradually made clear to Palestinians that this meant they would never have a state of their own. And so, it has been, both before and after the Zionists declared that they, not Palestine, would be a state.
Overthrow the Zionist state
The Zionist entity is not now and has never been a legitimate state—held in power only by the support of the most powerful imperialist state in the world now, just as it was by Britain earlier. As such, Israel must be overthrown, with its illegal fascist government put behind bars where they belong, and its people part of a free Palestine.
Palestinians have been trying to be a state since the early 20th century demise of the Ottoman Empire, of which they had been a content part of for 400 years. In Palestine before the development of Zionism, there was a Jewish population mingling in, and being part of, the Ottoman society.
The Ottomans were way ahead of Europe in tolerating different nationalities and religions within its borders. The Islamists in the empire were forced into the dominant iteration of that belief, but all other religions and ethnicities were allowed and not harassed. That is why, when every one of the Jews of Spain were expelled in 1492, the majority fled to the Ottoman Empire, and were freely accepted and allowed to form communities there.
What a contrast there is now for Palestinians, who are being bombed and starved to death in their own homes by an illegal state of murderers. Some of them are at the point of wanting to die. But Palestine must not die! Down with the criminal state of Israel! Jail for the fascists in government and out! Forward to a free, safe, and socialist Palestine!
1 Murder, Inc. (Murder, Incorporated) was an organized crime group active from 1929 to 1941 that acted as the enforcement arm of the National Crime Syndicate—a closely connected criminal organization that included and was started by the Irish Mob, and included Italian-American Mafia, the Jewish Mob, and other criminal organizations in New York City and elsewhere. It was believed to be responsible for between 400 and 1,000 contract killings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder,_Inc.
2 The Sykes–Picot Agreement was a 1916 secret treaty between the United Kingdom and France, with assent from the Russian Empire and the Kingdom of Italy, to define their mutually agreed spheres of influence and control in an eventual partition of the Ottoman Empire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes–Picot_Agreement
3 The Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British Government in 1917 during the First World War announcing its support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population.